Wars are won when you are willing to burn cities. Wars are won when you are willing to burn food supplies. Wars are won when you are willing to interdict medical supplies. Wars are won when you kill as many people on the other side as possible.

No one fights better than the men and women of the US Armed Forces. Unfortunately, the government and the citizenry have become squeamish and are not sure if winning is a good idea.

The article betrays a real ignorance of the Civil War, and of blockade running.
While the dolls may have been English made, any blockade running boat would have stored quinine or morphine supplies openly—because, if the Federals captured the blockade runner, the contents (dolls and all) would be sent north or destroyed anyway.
If these dolls were used for smuggling needed drugs, they were used by people smuggling drugs from the north. Smugglers would often go by train or boat to a place such as Memphis, TN, far from any seaport, and the dolls would be carried through the lines by civilians.
This supposition is bolstered by the fact that the donor, Confederate General Patton Anderson’s family, was from the Memphis area. And another correction—while Anderson commanded a division in the Confederate “Army of Tennessee”, he did NOT command that army, nor was there any “Tennessee Army of the Confederacy.”

You mean those wonderful, loving, kind Yankees were trying to keep simple medicines and painkillers from suffering humans?!?
That certainly goes against EVERYTHING the media taught me about the Civil War....hmmmmmm......

I generally agree with you, however the Revolution in warfare that is “Precision Guided Munitions” means that one can destroy only the military-related buildings in a city (such as Baghdad), or, you can take out only the military controlled rooms in a specific building, and minimizing damage to the civilian-occupied rooms — we are that accurate now. Warfare is changing, with regard to human casualties. I believe someone said that the military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan during our fight there, are less than the WW2 deaths on Okinawa during a one-half hour period.

In an older age, when neatly uniformed armies fought great pitched battles, there would eventually come a time when the leaders would gather around a table and sign a peace treaty. But we do not seem to live in that age any more.

Today, it's all guerrilla warfare, and so long as some bands want to keep fighting, it's very hard for anyone, on either side, to get them to stop. Each individual on that side will fight until a precision guided weapon takes him out. But a replacement is probably close to hand.

I would suggest that our smart weapons are impressive, but have not caused our enemies to sue for peace. I would further suggest that indiscriminately killing tens of thousands of men, women, and children is quite likely to cause our enemies to sue for peace.

It's common for Americans to say "We don't want to push too hard -- we might make them angry!" I say: They attacked NYC and killed thousands of us. Nothing that we do is going to encourage them to be more fanatic than they already are. We need to make them BEG for peace.

Smarmy because we are in the 21st century, not the 19th. I cannot believe that the author really equates medicinal supplies with common street drugs. To me, it's an incendiary attempt to “stir up” the readers.

Osprey books are usually very good. The person who wrote the Daily Mail article probably isn’t an expert in the field.
Most of the later war blockade runners were made in England for that purpose—small, fast, with shallow draft.

Yes, we would have. I fully believe the Civil War reduced the States’ rights and gave the federal government powers it did not previously have, but it was already on its way to having such powers. Previous Supreme Court cases already set that in motion. The South also was a participant.

If anything, should the South have won and it, too, followed the North with federal powers, imagine the argument today: “Well, of course it’s proper for the federal government to be so powerful, just look at the North, they do it, too.”

I don’t think the South winning would have changed much as far as federal power grabs.

21
posted on 10/28/2010 12:00:46 PM PDT
by CodeToad
(Islam needs to be banned in the US and treated as a criminal enterprise.)

I have spent four combat tours in Iraq and AF. The people we are fighting HAVE to be killed individually. They will NEVER sue for peace.

If we kill indiscriminately, it proves what they are saying about us and recruits flow like water. When we kill individually, the populace realizes it could have been them, and turn in and stop supporting the Jihadists.

In Iraq, we killed enough of the Jihadists, that the normal populace could turn the others in without threat of retaliation. The difference is the proximity of Pakistan which keeps producing recruits.

The good news is that we have body-tagged so much of their leadership, that the ones who take their place are nowhere near as competent and lose even more battles. But eventually, if we kill enough, they will stop fighting. They won't sue for peace, they just will turn to blowing up their own people in Pakistan or wherever they are.

23
posted on 10/28/2010 1:33:19 PM PDT
by wbarmy
(I chose to be a sheepdog once I saw what happens to the sheep.)

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